Art and History of Pompeii [antikvár]

InINTRODUCTIONHISTORICAL SURVEY___It is difficulí to say just how large any protohistoric set-tlement on the ridge of lava where Pompeii was to rise may have been. Not enough has been found in the way of pottery ihat can be referred to the inhumation culture of the Iron age pit tombs (a. fossa, 9th-7th cent. B.C.), but in any case the lack of water here makes it unlikely that an inhabited center of any size existed before the middle of the 7th cent. B.C.In the course of the 8th cent. B.C. Greek (Ischia and Cu-mae) and Etruscan colonization (Capua) in the territory of Campania stimulated the devetopment of Pompeii as a city around the area of the Forum. A point of encoun-ter for important trade routes, it became a clearing sta-tionfor traffic towards the hinterland. Up until about the middle ofthe 5th cent. B. C. the city was dominated polit-ically by the Etruscans, whose presence is verified by the finds of bucchero with Etruscan inscriptions. In the course of the 6th cent. B.C. the influence of the Greekculture is alsó documented by the terracottas which deco-rated the Temple of Apollo, by important ceramics and architectural elements that were part of the so-catled Doríc Temple. During the 5th cent. B.C., after the defeat ofthe Etruscans by the Greeks of Cumae and the Syracu-sans in the battle of Cumae in 474, the entire fertile Cam-panian countryside was occupied by Samnite peoples from the mountain hinterlands, both as a result of mili-tary operations and through a slow gradual penetration and assimiiation with the local population. This was probably when Pompeii spread out over the entire lava ridge and was surrounded by walls. It was in the 4th cent. B. C. that Pompeii began its great úrban expansion along a grid layout, and the buildings began to be constructed in limestone. A new series of conflicts broke out in that same century between the Samnites who had become city dwellers and new waves of Samnite peoples from the mountains. The intervention of Romé played a determining role and at the end of these struggles, known as Samnite wars (343-290 B.C.), Rométhe picture, a 19th-century reconstruction of the Temple of Venus in Pompeii.POMPElTKMI'I.K IIK \ i'.WS